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Original images posted by Ti Kawamoto on Picasa

Perhaps you saw the pictures above this week identified as a leak of the new Sony Nexus X? It was hard not to. From the moment these two images appeared on a Picasa album Sunday night until the end of the day Monday there were an astounding 521 news stories and 90,000 Google search results for what turned out to be a very well-executed hoax.

And that young guy in the plaid shirt? He's Ti Kawamoto, a video designer who lives in Burlington, VT, who was just having fun, "sharpening his skills." Other than wounding the pride and exposing the lack of checking on the part of tech writers, no harm was done. The occasional punking of the blogosphere could even be argued to be a good thing, but more on that in a bit.

The image Gawker used to "out" violentacrez

This story seems to me to be almost the inverse of the much more disturbing tale of Violentacrez, the Reddit uber-troll who was outed by Adrian Chen on Gawker last week. Michael Brutsch, as Gawker put it, "The man behind the troll," created 600 subreddits for obscene and offensive material that he moderated over the course of years. Brutsch generated so much traffic to the nether regions of Reddit that he gained considerable influence on the site and had a collaborative relationship with the (highly unmanaged) management. Reddit even give him an award (a gold-plated Reddit alien bobblehead) for his infamous Jailbait subreddit.

That bobblehead may come back to haunt Reddit. It meant so much to Brutsch to receive it, to be validated by Reddit, that he brought it with him to a shaming interview with CNN and showed it off on camera. See the full interview here:

Before I get to the odd, inverse mirror relationship between these two stories, let me describe what I think they have in common. We think of the internet as the "long tail" province of individuals narrowcasting their particular interests to like-minded people. We think of it as the universal market, university and public square, but also the collective unconscious. We think of it as a content proxy for the whole of human knowledge—a kind of infinite Borgesian encyclopedia. And it is all these things.

But the internet is also a series of pastures containing fairly docile digital herds. From tech journalists to pedophiles, there is a herd that can be driven with the lightest of prods. And both Kawamoto and Brutsch had effects disproportionate to their efforts as the digital herds amplified their signals way above the background noise of the digital pastures. But that is where the similarity ends. I have no intention of yoking Kawamoto and Brutsch together except in that they moved the herds skillfully and gained some pleasure from doing so.

To make that point, here are the contrasts that I see between the stories:

Intention

Both Kawamoto and Brutsch were advocating for content that they cared about through posting material online. Kawamoto is legitimately interested in the Nexus phone, and his explanation of how he constructed his prototype makes this clear. Brutsch is, by all accounts, a deeply twisted fellow. I don't want to waste keystrokes and brain space detailing it, but he is sincerely into a wide variety of kinky and offensive stuff. But Kawamoto's intentions for posting the faux prototype was much more open-ended than Brutsch's reasons for his "contributions" to Reddit. “There are hot button topics that you can make a comment about and enrage people," Brutsch said on CNN. "And sadly for me, I enjoy doing that.”